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Germany and the U.K. have cut their climate pollution in half. Here’s how Canada stacks up
(www.nationalobserver.com)
Spoiler: Not great
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
33 points (100.0% liked)
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That is actually better then I thought (Germany and UK) but I'm pretty sure we're still on our way to miss our targets by a mile even though I don't know what they are, exactly. Probably reduction not compared to 1990 but 2010 or 2020?
From 2010 to 2022 Germany's reduction was only from 10 to 8 t per capita:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany
And it seems to have gone up from 2020 to 2022 😢
And it seems to have gone up from 2020 to 2022
Russian Natural Gas is gone and they closed their Nuclear Power Stations so back to coal they went!
Not true. Coal use has actually declined again quickly, while renewables have supplanted the (meagre) former nuclear capacity. Germany also imports a bit more power from its European neighbors to avoid spinning up costly fossil plants. Most of the imports are low-CO2, i.e. Swedish/Austrian/Swiss hydro power, Danish wind power, and French nuclear.
France would have been an interesting country to conpare to here, as their electricity was already largely decarbonised in 1990.
Its not quite the same data, that's CO2 per person from energy and industry (excluding land use changes), the article was looking at CO2 equivalent of all GHGs. Still shows what I suspected, that France was lower overall but not going down as quickly as they are unable to get quick wins from decarbonising electricity.
Edit: actually scrap that I realised there was more data further down the page and it looks like when looking at total GHG emissions France is going down at about the same rate as Germany despite starting from a lower baseline. Viva la France! (though not as fast as the UK who have gone from per capital emissions equal to Germany in 1990 to being equal to France today)